Super sonics: Seattle singer Zoe Muth finds home in country sound

When you drop the needle on the latest album by Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve discovered an unknown gem by Johnny Cash.

Brian Mackey

Spanish-flavored trumpets, traditional steel guitar, a two-step beat.

When you drop the needle on track one, side one of “Starlight Hotel,” the latest album by Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve discovered an unknown gem by Johnny Cash.

Then Muth begins singing — a soft, unassuming alto with a hint of twang — and the comparisons fall away. This is new music in the old style, a sound your grandparents would recognize, but with original lyrics rooted in modern troubles.

Working men and women are the subject of much of Muth’s music. They’re portrayed honestly, neither romanticized nor fantasized.

This is not “let’s crack open a beer on a dirt road in my camo ball cap” country. To be sure, the men and women in Muth’s songs probably listen to that kind of music to escape the drudgery of their daily lives. But that kind of stuff doesn’t capture the pain.

Muth, however, does. It’s apparent in these lines from her “Tired Worker’s Song”: “They say the dreams of a man must be hard to hide / But we do it so well / Every day from nine to five.”

In a recent telephone interview, Muth said she has been inspired by the drive of musicians who came out of the rural South.

“I’m sure they love playing music, and that was their passion,” she said. “But it was like, ‘I either can play music and make a living doing that, or do this other job that I hate for the rest of my life.’ ”

Some of her concern for the working man comes from Muth’s hometown.

“I definitely think of myself as a pretty liberal person, and I think part of that is coming from Seattle,” she said. “I travel all over the country and say, ‘You don’t recycle here?!’ ”

Her liberal politics might have come from growing up in an urban environment, she said, but it’s also something she rebels against.

“What’s happened to Seattle over the years is a lot of people who make a lot of money have come into the city, and in a way it seems like they don’t respect the history of the city,” Muth said. “There’s all this old stuff being torn down and new huge condos and townhouses everywhere.

“I’ve always had sort of a bad taste in my mouth for the gentrification.”

Despite all that talk about hard times and hard lives, Muth’s songs can be witty, keeping with the best traditions of the form.

On “Starlight Hotel,” the best example of that might be “If I Can't Trust You With a Quarter (How Can I Trust You With My Heart?)”

As the title says, it’s about someone ruining a date with poor taste in music.

She sings: “When you said you’d never heard of John Prine / Well I knew right away you weren’t worth my time.”

Muth said her songwriting process is a slow one.

“Every time I think of something, I just write it down,” she said. “It’s just a sentence here and a sentence there. Hopefully it can keep flowing and rhyming and then I can write a little bit more.”

“I think I’m just never satisfied, really. … If I didn’t just say, ‘OK, it’s just going to be this way, let’s do it,’ it would never get recorded.”

Muth, 31, is not one of those people who always dreamed of a life in music.

She only began playing for people regularly in her mid-20s. Until May, she worked full time as a preschool teacher and would take a week or two off here and there for touring.

“Part of what I loved was working with the kids and being able to have so much fun at work, doing art and music,” Muth said. “The part that I dreaded about that job was having to do parent conferences.”

In college, she majored in — as she described it — half-botany and horticulture and half-social work.

“I figured maybe I could work for some kind of environmental organization, a nonprofit or something along those lines,” Muth said. “But again, that would require me talking to a lot of adults all day long, and I figured out that’s not really what I wanted to do.”

So now she’s a full-time musician, and said it’s been going well so far: “I can pay my rent, at least.”

Muth added that, having been a preschool teacher, she’s used to not having a very high-paying job.

“If I could make as much money playing music as I was teaching preschool, I might as well have more fun,” she said.